Different types of GTM motions for DevTools

Overview

Lets dive into the different types of GTM motions that DevTool companies use - how they bring products to market and drive adoption.

You’ve probably heard terms like top-down, bottoms-up, PLG, sales-led, or marketing-led. These refer to different GTM motions. While these models aren’t exclusive to DevTools (you’ll find them in broader B2B SaaS too), the way they show up in DevTool companies has its own flavor. And there is one GTM motion very unique to Devtools.

We broadly categorize GTM motions into five types:

• Purely Bottoms-up [Could be Product Led or Marketing Led]
• Top-down [Sales Led]
• Hybrid
• Community-led / Open-source (very unique to DevTools)
• Partner-led (more common in DevTools)

Let’s break these down one by one, with examples.

Purely Bottoms-up [Could be Product Led or Marketing Led]

This is the GTM motion that has seen the most adoption and popularity in the last decade

In this motion, anyone can sign up and start using your product on their own -  usually via:

• A free tier (free forever, but with limited functionality), or
• A free trial (full access, but for a limited time)

This model relies on self-serve adoption. Users, i.e., developers, find the product (often via content, word-of-mouth, or SEO), sign up, and start getting value immediately. Over time, as their usage grows or they hit limits, they naturally convert to paid plans.

Advantages:

1. Faster time to market‍
   
   1. You don’t need to build a full enterprise platform before launching.
   2. You can ship individual features early and get quick feedback from developers
   3. You’re not blocked by compliance, SOC2, or procurement processes

2. Possibility of viral adoption and exponential growth: Bottoms-up motions can unlock exponential adoption.Developers discover and share the product organically. Example: Cursor’s rapid growth came largely from user-driven virality, not enterprise sales.

Disadvantages:

1. Easier to drive adoption, harder to monetize: You often get a huge top-of-funnel, but many users never convert. This can strain your infra and support without contributing to revenue.
   
   1. Developers don’t like to pay - especially for hobby or side projects
   2. Even for work-related usage, they need to convince their manager or CTO

2. Small ticket sizes:  Self-serve motions are great for low cost per month plans, but struggle with high-ticket sales. Few users will swipe a card for $10K+ without talking to sales. That’s why most bottoms-up products rely on gradual upgrades (e.g., $0 → $20 → $100)

3. Developer adoption does not automatically mean company adoption - Just because developers like your product doesn’t mean the company will adopt it. Moving from dev delight to company-wide rollout requires solving a different kind of product-market fit.

While bottoms-up motions can be a fantastic way to kickstart adoption and build developer love, they often leave money on the table if pursued in isolation. Without layering on a sales motion, you may struggle to monetize effectively or expand into larger accounts.

Works best when:

• Product is largely self-serve and easy to get started with
• It’s valuable for an individual developer, does not need team buy-in

This makes bottoms-up ideal for startups looking to validate, iterate, and grow quickly - especially when targeting individual devs or small teams.

Examples:

• Postman (early years): Postman didn’t rely on sales in the beginning - it spread simply through developers discovering the product, using it and sharing it with their peers. 
• Coding Assistants like Cursor: Have primarily relied on a product-led growth strategy, focusing on individual developers and leveraging a freemium pricing model. Their approach has allowed them to scale rapidly without a sales force.

Purely Top-down [Sales Led]

Top-down is the opposite of bottoms-up. Here, the product isn’t self-serve - users can’t just sign up and start using it. Instead, the GTM motion is driven entirely by the sales team. 

Instead of developers discovering the tool organically, this motion starts with decision-makers. The Sales Team reaches out to CTOs/Engineering Leaders/Decision Makers, who may/ may not decide to do a POC and then purchase the product. 

Advantages:

1. Large enterprise deals with high ACV: Top-down motions allow for massive enterprise contracts. You’re generally solving big, strategic problems that unlock budget from senior decision-makers.

2. Strategic alignment: You’re engaging leadership early, which helps ensure your product is rolled out across teams with long-term buy-in.

Disadvantages:

1. Longer time to market: Enterprise buyers need security reviews, procurement steps, and often a technical POC. The process is slow and requires deep stakeholder alignment. 

2. Long sales cycles: Multiple stakeholders may get involved - from CTOs to legal to procurement. It’s not unusual for deals to stretch across quarters.

3. No grassroots adoption = resistance from below: Developers are increasingly influential in buying decisions. If the tool is forced top-down without buy-in from actual users, you risk pushback, low usage, or churn post-purchase.
   
   
4. Slow ramp-up and no virality: Sales-led motions don’t scale through word of mouth or developer communities. Every deal is pushed by a rep -  through cold outreach, demos, and follow-ups. That means growth is linear, not exponential.

Works best when:

• Your product is complex, high-touch,  requires deep integration into existing systems 
• It impacts multiple teams, a core part of infrastructure, or mission-critical workflows
• Your product is a high-ticket item - typically $50K, $100K+ where buyers expect a consultative process.

Examples:

• Conductor: Conductor is built on top of Apache Kafka and focuses on securing Kafka data streams - a critical requirement for sectors like FinTech. Their sales approach involves identifying companies already using Kafka, evaluating their data security needs, and engaging directly with senior decision-makers such as CIOs, CTOs, and VPs of Engineering. This is not a tool individual developers would adopt independently and hence their GTM is designed for leadership-driven evaluation and company-wide adoption.
• MuleSoft (now part of Salesforce): MuleSoft specializes in API management and integration solutions. Their sales approach involves engaging directly with CTOs and CIOs to provide comprehensive integration platforms that necessitate organization-wide adoption.

Hybrid (Product/Marketing Led Sales)

A hybrid GTM motion combines both bottom-up and top-down strategies. You create a product that individual developers can discover and use on their own, while also running outbound sales to engage decision-makers inside those same companies.

How it works:

• Product is self-serve, so developers adopt naturally
• Your GTM team monitors usage for buying signals
• Sales engages the account when there’s clear intent or traction

This motion is common among mature DevTool companies.

Advantages:

1. Faster product development and feedback: You can launch quickly, test features with real users, and get rapid feedback from developers -  just like in pure PLG.

2. Early traction, deeper monetization: PLG gives you bottom-up momentum while sales converts it into high-value enterprise contracts.

3. Developer advocacy unlocks top-down: If devs already love the product, sales cycles are faster and smoother. They might introduce you to their enterprise buyers organically or at least give positive reviews when asked for feedback. This makes sales conversations much warmer - especially when selling into their teams or leadership.

4. More efficient sales pipeline: Usage data provides clear intent signals - you know which accounts to prioritize based on real product activity.

5. De-risks monetization: You avoid building a popular but unmonetizable product. Sales ensures there's a path from usage to revenue.

6. Flexible monetization layers: You can monetize at multiple levels - individual devs, team plans, enterprise rollouts - giving you room to grow with the customer.

Disadvantages/Watchouts:

1. Complex Execution: You need strong coordination across product, growth, and sales. Metrics, handoff processes, and attribution must be tightly defined.

2. Can Be Expensive: You’re running both PLG infrastructure (onboarding flows, freemium tiers, usage tracking) and enterprise sales. This requires resourcing both sides of the motion.

Works best when:

1. Your product is valuable for an Individual Developer, but it is even more valuable when the entire Team uses it

Examples:

• Snyk and GitHub both grew through developer adoption, then layered on top-down sales for enterprise contracts.
• Retool, Hasura, and LaunchDarkly all use freemium or self-serve trials, but upsell into enterprise features once usage expands.
• Cursor, despite reporting $100M+ in bottoms-up-driven revenue, is now also adopting a sales motion to go deeper in accounts and monetize more effectively.

Community-led / Open-source Led

Community-led or open source is a GTM motion that’s especially unique to developer tools. It can be considered as a variant of bottoms-up, but with a key difference: instead of just giving users access to the product through a free tier, you’re giving them access to the actual codebase.

This means:

• Developers can clone your repo, deploy the product locally, modify it, and build on top of it.
• It’s not just about usage -  it’s about co-creation, transparency, and long-term community trust.

Developers start using the open-source project because it’s free, trusted, and community-backed. Over time, as it becomes core to production workloads, the company behind it offers value-added products and services - like enterprise features, cloud hosted versions, or support.

Advantages:

1. Community Contributions: When your code is public, others can contribute to it. Popular open source projects often benefit from bug fixes, new features, documentation improvements, and even entirely new integrations -  all driven by the community.

2. Potential for virality: If the project is genuinely useful and well-documented, it can spread fast -  through dev communities, blog posts, and conference talks. Many OSS tools become popular long before a sales team exists.
   
3. Community Ownership and Evangelism: Open source products often evoke strong emotional alignment from users. Over time, communities don’t just use the tool - they stand by it. This kind of grassroots loyalty and evangelism is rare in SaaS, and incredibly powerful for long-term growth.
   
   
4. Transparency and Trust - Especially in Infra:In certain categories (like databases, runtimes, or backend infra), open source isn’t just nice to have - it’s required. Teams want to avoid vendor lock-in, and having access to the source code builds deep trust. It reassures users that they can self-host, audit, and extend the platform if needed.
   
   
5. The maintainers are best positioned to monetize: The company or contributors behind the OSS project often have the deepest expertise - making them the natural partner for paid support, services, or hosted offerings.

Disadvantages:

1. Driving Adoption Isn’t Automatic: Just because you’ve open-sourced something doesn’t mean developers will start using it. You still need to invest heavily in:
   
   • Developer education
   • Evangelism
   • Community engagement
   • Content marketing

For example, in the graph database space, there are multiple players - Neo4j, Memgraph, Fluree. Simply being open source doesn’t differentiate you. Fluree still has to actively earn mindshare among developers to get adopted

2. Takes time to build popularity: It can take years to build a widely adopted OSS project. Until it reaches critical mass, monetization is difficult - and growth can be unpredictable.

3. Monetization is not easy:  Even if your open source project becomes popular, the next question is: how do you make money?
   Since the code is free and out in the open, you can’t just charge for access. You need to layer on a monetization model, such as:
   
   • Managed cloud hosting
   • Premium features (e.g. SSO, RBAC)
   • Support or enterprise-grade SLAs
   • Usage-based billing for scale

Figuring out this monetization layer — without alienating your community — is one of the biggest strategic challenges in open source GTM.

      4.   Risk of Forking or Getting Cloned by Larger Players: Other companies - including large cloud providers - might take your open-source project, host it themselves, and commercialize it without giving anything back. This can make it harder for you to build a sustainable business around your own project.

Works best when: 

• Your open-source project is widely adopted and technically complex - something that's hard to run at scale without expert help
• Companies rely on it in production and need support, stability, and guaranteed uptime to avoid costly failures
• You can offer real value beyond the OSS code - like enterprise features, managed hosting, consulting, or on-prem deployments that help customers succeed

Examples:

• Confluent (commercializing Apache Kafka): The original creators of Kafka built Confluent to offer hosted services, enterprise features, and support - turning a complex OSS project into a scalable business.
• Elastic (built on Elasticsearch): Started with a popular open-source search engine, then layered on a powerful open-core model with premium features, support, and managed cloud offerings.

Partner-led 

Partner-led is a GTM motion where your product is adopted and distributed not directly by your own team -  but through system integrators, software development agencies, or implementation partners.

This model is especially common in DevTool ecosystems because many developer tools get adopted as part of larger client projects. The partner chooses the tools, and the client ends up paying for them -  often without being the one who selected them.

Advantages:

1. Scalable Distribution with Low CAC” A single SI partner can bring you into dozens of projects. You leverage their relationships, reach, and credibility - without starting from scratch each time.

2. Repeatable Revenue Channels: Once an agency standardizes on your stack, it often keeps using your tool across many implementations.

3. Trusted Integrators Drive Adoption: Since the partner is responsible for delivering results, they act as your evangelist and technical consultant.

Disadvantages:

1. Requires Product Maturity: Partners won’t risk client outcomes on immature or poorly documented tools. Your product must be robust, with clear onboarding and support.

2. Indirect Relationships: You often don’t interact directly with the end customer. That makes it harder to gather feedback, identify upsell opportunities, or build brand affinity.

3. Dedicated Partner Enablement Needed: You’ll need a GTM motion built around partner success - including training, certification, partner marketing, and co-selling support.

Works best when: 

• Your tool is infrastructure-level and modular (e.g., DBs, CMSs, frontend platforms)
• It’s used as a building block inside larger client projects
• Partners act as the decision-makers or heavy influencers

Examples:

• ClickHouse: A complex OLAP database often implemented by data engineering consultancies and analytics-focused SIs.
  
  • Alokai (formerly Vue Storefront): Widely integrated by eCommerce development agencies